{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T02:48:32Z","timestamp":1773802112567,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)","issue":"15","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["AAAI"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is crucial to human-computer interaction. Existing cross-domain FER (CD-FER) methods mainly focus on single-source closed-set scenarios, transferring knowledge from a single source domain to a target domain with identical class sets. However, CD-FER faces two real-world challenges: 1) the need to leverage information from multiple sources, leading to multi-domain shift, and 2) the necessity to recognize unseen target classes, resulting in class shift. These issues give rise to a novel and challenging task, which we define as Multi-domain Open-set FER (MO-FER). In this paper, we propose PromptEmo, a novel CLIP-based framework that leverages bilateral textual prompts to address both shifts in the MO-FER task. Leveraging the generalizability of LLM, PromptEmo constructs trainable positive prompts with LLM-generated emotion descriptions for seen classes, as well as template-derived negative prompts to enhance the reasoning for unseen classes. Then, we introduce a modal-task optimization paradigm organized from two perspectives: textual semantics and visual domains, yielding Intra-modal Space-specific Optimization (ISO) and Cross-modal Emotion-aware Interaction (CEI) strategies. ISO refines the CLIP-based textual space to ensure semantic separation between bilateral prompts and improves the latent visual space by promoting inter-domain alignment. Founded on ISO, CEI facilitates effective vision-language interactions, resulting in four joint loss terms that improve emotion recognition by shaping a domain-invariant, discriminative feature space. PromptEmo surpasses the current SOTA method by 7.7% AUC on unseen classes across four FER datasets, serving as a strong baseline for the MO-FER task.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1609\/aaai.v40i15.38224","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T00:16:30Z","timestamp":1773792990000},"page":"12322-12330","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["PromptEmo: Learning Emotion with Bilateral Textual Prompts in Multi-Domain Open-set Scenarios"],"prefix":"10.1609","volume":"40","author":[{"given":"Xinyi","family":"Zeng","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Yuxiang","family":"Yang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Pinxian","family":"Zeng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Wenxia","family":"Yin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Bo","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Xi","family":"Wu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Yan","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"9382","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]},"container-title":["Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence"],"original-title":[],"link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/38224\/42186","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/38224\/42186","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T00:16:30Z","timestamp":1773792990000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/view\/38224"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]},"references-count":0,"journal-issue":{"issue":"15","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,17]]}},"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1609\/aaai.v40i15.38224","relation":{},"ISSN":["2374-3468","2159-5399"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2374-3468","type":"electronic"},{"value":"2159-5399","type":"print"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]}}}